Was This Sculpture Inspired By Lady Gaga’s Wardrobe?

Everything Lady Gaga wears is “art” — whether she covers herself in raw meat like at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards, or not. But do you remember that unassuming, sliver stringy gown she wore in 2014, that miraculously inflated into a massive jellyfish?

Lady Gaga in Paris wearing an inflatable jellyfish dress in 2014

Well, at the 22nd annual Armory Show in New York — America’s leading modern and contemporary art fair — artist Shih Chieh Huang showed a spitting image of this silhouette with a cyborg jellyfish-like light installation entitled Disphotic Zone (the ocean layer that is barely lit, where some jellyfish live).

The piece is hung in a dark, enclosed room, like a giant chandelier with tentacles that inflate and deflate sporadically. And at the VIP and press day yesterday, guests oohed and ahhed, exalting the piece to have some transient, cosmic power — but of course, I couldn’t help but just make comparison to Gaga’s past fashion (as if she hasn’t received enough attention this year, already). Huang’s installation — perhaps influenced by Gaga’s dress — is complex: he combines strange objects like plastic bottles with complicated technology to reflect bioluminescent organism (which he studied during his fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution — the dude’s smart). He’s even presented this technology at a TED talk in 2014.

There are other showstoppers at the show including massive Kehinde Wiley paintings, seen hanging in Lucious Lyon’s home in the show Empire. The Armory Show opens to the public today from March 3 – 6, and we highly suggest checking out Huang’s trippy art installation at the Ronald Feldman Fine Arts booth at Pier 94.